


Swallow Your Fears

by Leopardmask



Series: Glitch AU: What Goes Around Comes Around [2]
Category: Hermitcraft
Genre: Faceless, Gen, Glitch!AU, Glitches, The Void, Transformation, extreme pica, no beta we die like Zedaph testing new things, non-permanent minecraft death, season 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28653258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leopardmask/pseuds/Leopardmask
Summary: Nobody’s perfect, even those who created the worlds. There are always flaws in the Great Code. Usually, they’re avoided, or ignored, and when the next update comes, those flaws are gone. Some, though, are exploited for Player benefit.With the most recent update, something about working with these glitches has changed. Work with them too long... and the world will start glitching you.Zedaph loves to experiment, to try things that no one has ever tried, to go places where no one has ever been. The Undervoid, beneath the bedrock of the Overworld, is one such place. Going there is an exhilarating experience, that he almost wishes he could bring back with him.
Series: Glitch AU: What Goes Around Comes Around [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2042692
Comments: 15
Kudos: 69





	Swallow Your Fears

Zedaph bounced nervously from foot to foot. He wore elytra, but no armor, and the only thing in his inventory was six firework rockets. A slight breeze brushed past him, even though he was as deep underground as he could be.

Well, almost as deep.

In front of him was a small, unassuming hole in the ground. A hole through bedrock. Beyond it, Zedaph could only see blackness. Today, though, he would get to see it from a different point of view. He checked his elytra one more time, then jumped through.

As soon as possible, Zedaph opened the wings and swooped into a fast glide. He skimmed along as high as he could go without scraping against the rock. Flying here, with rock above and nothing below, was exhilarating and disorienting. Zedaph almost felt like he was flying upside-down - the ground should be below him, not above him.

Speaking of above him. Zedaph banked into a turn that he hoped was all the way around. There were no landmarks to sight on here, and his heart sank when he realized he couldn’t see the hole he had dived through. Cautiously, he descended, then flipped over and looked up, searching the bedrock until his flight started to stall. Nothing. He fired a rocket to stabilize his flight, then tried again. He didn’t want to  _ die _ in the Undervoid - this was his only elytra! But still he saw nothing except- there! Zedaph recklessly fired a rocket and shot toward the pinpoint of light in the distance. He reached it, almost overshot, flipped around, and zoomed through, scraping his shoulder and tearing one wing of the elytra on re-entry. Zedaph crashed to the smooth stone ground a few meters away, clutching the injury and breathing hard. That was...

That was  _ fun. _

\-----

It took a few days, but Zedaph had an idea on how he might be able to get a better look at the liminal below-bedrock space, without having to worry about elytra or rockets or losing the hole. And that idea involved a pig.

“C’mon little guy, it’s fine,” Zedaph coaxed it, as he tugged it down into the basement on a lead. “You’ll be perfectly safe, I promise.”

The pig wandered idly around the small room, shying away as Zedaph tied the other end of the lead to a fence post. He checked the knot a few times, then made another knot to be sure. Once the pig was securely tied, a makeshift rope harness around its body, Zedaph brought out a saddle for it. He had to corner the pig before it let him put the saddle on. “Hey now, why are you scared?” Zedaph tried to soothe the pig. “I wouldn’t blame you, if you knew what I was planning, I suppose, but pigs don’t  _ plan _ things. You just wander around and eat carrots. Here, you want a carrot?” Zedaph took two carrots out of his pocket, holding one out to the pig, nibbling on the other himself. Warily, the pig stepped forward far enough to take the carrot out of Zedaph’s hand. Zedaph took the opportunity to quickly finish tying down the saddle and pick up the pig like a cat. “Goooood pig.”

The pig squirmed as Zedaph carefully dangled it into the bottomless pit, then let go. It fell to the end of its lead and stopped, gently swinging a few feet below. It looked up and snorted at Zedaph.

“See?” Zedaph smiled. “Nothing to worry about. Lead’s holding. You’re the first pig in space! Isn’t that exciting?”

The pig just oinked again.

“Right then.” Zedaph clapped his hands together. “Now I have to figure out how to get down there with you.”

He emptied most of his inventory into a chest - just in case - and jumped onto the bed he had set up nearby. Then he trotted back over to the hole. He sat on the edge, legs dangling down, and just watched for a moment. Just sitting here was actually quite nice, he decided.

But he hadn’t dangled a pig into the Void so that he could sit above and watch. So, finally, Zedaph pushed himself off, reaching for the safety of a mount. For a terrifying moment, he missed his grab. Then his hand caught the stirrup. He found himself swinging, part of a strange double-pendulum, and grunted as he hoisted himself onto the pig’s back. He put his hand up to stop his head from bonking as the pig pendulum swung back and forth under the stony ceiling. Once both had settled, Zedaph looked around and gasped at the view.

It wasn’t something he could appreciate while flying around on an elytra. The infinite bedrock above, the infinite void below... Once again, it almost felt like he should be upside-down, standing on the stone with a black sky above. He tossed a spare carrot and watched it fall, down, down, until it was swallowed up by darkness. It was peaceful. The only movement was him swinging slightly on the lead; the only light filtered dimly down from the torches above; the only sound was the occasional distressed oink of Yoyo the pig.

Eventually, though, Zedaph was ready to go back and record his experience. He was doing this for science, after all - if he wasn’t writing it down, then really he was just screwing around. He grabbed onto the lead and started to pull himself up.

There, Zedaph encountered a problem. He had put the fence post off to one side, which meant the lead was hanging flush against the rock. It didn’t look like it was fraying, fortunately, but whatever he tried, Zedaph couldn’t manage to get his hand around the rope where it met the bedrock. And, since the bedrock was still a meter thick at that point, he couldn’t quite reach past it either while hanging on the rope below.

After a few moments of trying, Zedaph’s arms were starting to shake from holding himself up on the rope. He sighed and looked downward, to the infinite Undervoid.

Well, he would have done this eventually anyway.

Zedaph let go of the rope.

But for the receding signs of home above him, it almost didn't feel like he was falling.  It was the least frantic fall he has ever experienced, at first. 

Then the Void took hold. As it enveloped him, Zedaph let out a brief cry of unexpected pain before his voice was squeezed out of him. The Endvoid would simply suffocate and freeze its unlucky victims. In the Undervoid, though, Zedaph felt like he was being crushed and ripped apart all at once. It was cold, not the numbing cold of the Endvoid, but the chill of every bit of heat being sucked into complete nothingness. He couldn't tell the moment that his vision went dark.

Zedaph gasped awake in his bed. His stomach rumbled. That was odd - people didn't usually respawn hungry. Zedaph pulled a roast chicken out of a chest and swallowed it as he contemplated what to do next.

It didn't take long for curiosity to once again overcome his nervousness. Zedaph rooted through his chests for supplies, tossing more food into his mouth as he went. In no time, he was standing at the lip of the hole again. He held a totem of undying in each hand, and had strapped a shard of glowstone to his head as a headlight. Elytra would be ideal for diving and staying down as long as possible, but Zedaph's was torn now, and he didn't want to die with it on anyway; even if he was as careful as he could be, he still fully expected the Void to drag him down and kill him again.

He jumped. This time he didn't aim for Yoyo; he just dove straight into the waiting blackness.

As the Void crushed him, it seemed to bend and steal the meager light from the glowstone. As the Void tore at him, it ripped the totems out of his hands, as if to openly deny him from falling further into its domain. Zedaph woke shaking and starving. But he supposed he had learned something.

He traipsed back up to his main storage area. He was definitely hungry for something in particular, but there was something very oddly specific about what that he couldn’t figure out. The stuff in his food chest would do, but nothing really appealed to him as  _ right. _ Maybe he had some obscure food item forgotten about in another chest? Zedaph poked through chests, barely seeing the contents, following his stomach. He found something appealing, grabbed it, and swallowed it whole before he even identified what it was.

...Wait. What  _ was _ it?

Zedaph backtracked, opening the chest he had taken from again. It was one of his chests filled with random leftover building bits. He found the stack of items he was pretty sure he had taken from: a stack of... fence gates? Zedaph frowned. He was pretty sure this was the right stack, and this was definitely the same chest. Had he just-

He grabbed another item at random from the chest. A noteblock. He felt silly even trying this, but hey, no one was around to watch him putting his mouth on random items.

Almost as soon as the corner of the noteblock passed his lips, the entire thing disappeared down his throat without a sound. Zedaph jumped and stared at his now-empty hands in shock. He preemptively put one hand to his stomach, expecting to feel  _ something _ after suddenly consuming two large, solid objects made entirely of wood, but all he felt was a tiny bit less hungry.

This should probably be cause for concern. But it was also... kind of cool? He definitely wanted to show off his new superpower to someone, and maybe get some advice on what to do about it. So he called Tango and asked him to bring an assortment of weird items over.

“Zed?” Tango called, stepping in the door. “I’m here- gwah!” He did a double-take at Zedaph - who was standing casually and now confusedly near the entrance - startled backward, tripped over the little ledge around the door, and fell on his butt. 

Zedaph froze at the reaction and the look of... of  _ fear _ on his friend’s face. “Tango?” he queried tentatively. “Are you alright?” 

He reached forward to help Tango up. Tango flinched and scrambled back farther. “Me? I’m fine!” he answered wildly. “B-but you- you’re-”

Zedaph leaned back. “Am  _ I _ alright?”

Tango shook his head vehemently as he got back to his feet. “I don’t think you are! Have you seen yourself??”

Zedaph frowned. “No, I haven’t...” He pulled out his communicator, flipped the camera to look at his face - and almost dropped it. “Oh my god.”

His eyes, and some of the skin around them, had turned jet black, so dark and lacking in reflection that he couldn’t tell where his eyes even were. Bits of the edges seemed fuzzy, flickery, not quite settled. Strange, spiking tendrils of black spread from the edges, as if searching for more of him to overtake. 

Zedaph sat down heavily on the short ledge, unable to tear his gaze away until his hands were shaking too much to see the communicator screen. The same threads of blackness were at the corners of his mouth, too. Tentatively, he opened his mouth. Void.

He traced one of the black threads. It was a positively horrifying look. No wonder Tango had reacted the way he did.

“Sorry,” Tango murmured. “That, uh... that wasn’t what you called me over to show me, was it?”

Zedaph chuckled despite himself. “No, it wasn’t. Well, maybe. I don’t know. It’s probably related. Here, toss me one of the weird junk items I asked you to bring.”

Tango obliged, handing him an iron block.

Zedaph sat and held it for a moment. Then, like the noteblock, he let it switch to its full size, and stuck one corner in his mouth. Like the noteblock, this was enough for him to suddenly swallow the whole thing. He waved his empty hands demonstratively at Tango. “Like I said, probably related to the void-face thing, but see? I have a superpower!”

Tango just stared, with an almost comical look of shock, disgust, and awe. “...No way did I just see you do that. No way. What- you’re messing with me, aren’t you? You- you palmed the block into your inventory.”

“No tricks,” Zedaph assured him, a little somberly. “Just weird. Try something you know I can’t fake if you like.”

Tango paused, staring into space for a moment as he searched his inventory. After a moment, he handed Zedaph a bucket of lava. “If you take the lava and leave the bucket, without setting yourself on fire, I might start to believe what I’m seeing here.”

“Ooh, that’s a new thing to try!” Zedaph took the bucket, then tipped it up like he was drinking a bucket of milk. The lava poured slowly, but he drank it all, feeling only a little warmer from the experience. He handed the empty bucket back and grinned. “Wow, that was a boost! Best meal I've had all day, strangely." 

He couldn’t help himself - he started laughing at Tango’s expression.

“You’re taking this way too well,” Tango accused.

“I’m sorry,” Zedaph giggled. “It’s just- the look on your face-” He broke into another brief fit of giggles before he sobered slightly. “I guess since I’m not looking at my own face all the time, it’s a bit easier for me to just... forget it, you know?”

“Hmm.” Tango opened his communicator. “I’m messaging Impulse. If we’re freaking out about your face and your weird new garbage disposal power, he needs to be in on it.”

For the next few minutes, they just talked, chatting about anything else. At one point, Tango frowned and sent another message. “He must be busy.”

After some more forced conversation, a message came in on Tango’s communicator. But it wasn’t from Impulse.

<iskall85> -> <Tango> hallo

<iskall85> -> <Tango> you’re trying to talk to Impulse?

<Tango> -> <iskall85> Yeah, how did you know?

<iskall85> -> <Tango> snooped on his comm

<iskall85> -> <Tango> he’s passed out right now

<iskall85> -> <Tango> x took him to my base

<iskall85> -> <Tango> something’s wrong

\-----

Xisuma made Impulse rest for two days before he finally let him go. In that time, Zedaph learned a few more things about what was happening to himself.

One, it was what Xisuma was calling a “feedback glitch”, much like what had happened to Impulse. Zedaph hadn’t been exploiting glitches himself, but he had been interacting with the Undervoid, which in this world would not have been accessible without Impulse’s work breaking the bedrock. Impulse felt guilty about it, of course, but Zedaph reassured him in the same way that Xisuma had reassured Iskall: no one knew this would happen, and it was no one’s fault that it did. Also, Impulse  _ had _ warned Zedaph about messing with the Undervoid and Zedaph had done it anyway, so if anything it was Zedaph’s own fault, right?

Two, Zedaph never felt totally full, but what he ate would stave off the persistent hunger for a time. He could still eat food normally, but it barely satisfied him, no matter how much he ate. Generally, the heavier an item was, the more filling it would be. Zedaph frequently found himself taking from Tango’s overproducing iron farm, or, once, making a trip to the nearest gold farm. A single gold block could keep him going for hours, but he didn't like visiting most of the farms themselves. The space above the roof of the Nether felt just a little too  _ familiar _ for his liking.

Three, despite the decision to rescue Yoyo and block off the Undervoid access hole, the creeping blackness still spread across him. The theory was that the more that he consumed things that humans weren’t meant to consume, the more the Void advanced. But, with normal food providing little benefit, Zedaph found he didn’t have much of a choice. By the time Impulse rejoined them, Tango was cracking jokes about Zedaph's "sleep mask of the Void", as it now covered much of the top half of his face.

“So, we can’t stop it,” Impulse mused, the three of them talking in Zedaph’s base. “But the Void isn’t  _ hurting _ Zed any, is it?”

“Not really,” Zedaph said. “I feel totally normal, other than the food thing obviously. I just... look terrifying now.”

“That’s interesting,” Tango frowned. “I just noticed - Zed, I don’t know if you’ll be able to see this, but Impulse might. Both of you have these spots on you that kind of... flicker, I guess, between human and what you’re turning into. The way it looks and moves is really similar.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Impulse replied, “since we’re both glitched.” He inspected his arm, nodding as he noticed the effect. “But we’re here about Zed, not me, right? You’re the one who got a whole new superpower out of this.”

“If you can call it that,” Zedaph chuckled. “I think I’d rather go back to being a superhero with no powers.”

“I mean, hey,” Tango pointed out, “if you put the mask on, we’d be able to see where your eyes are-”

“If gold and lava are the two best ‘food’ sources you’ve found so far,” Impulse interrupted, with air quotes around “food”, “I wonder if it has to do with both mass and energy.”

Tango gave him a blank stare.

“Gold would still be the best day-to-day thing for you, I’m sure,” Impulse amended, “since it’s farmable. You could probably hit X up for some if you need to, I think he has an Overworld farm. But something with a lot of potential energy might... I don’t know, be an option?”

“What kind of energy are we talking, here?” Zedaph asked.

\-----

“You ready?” Impulse called, before checking the calibration of the slime block launcher one more time.

“I’ve been ready!” Zedaph called back.

The trio had set up a basic launcher in the desert outside Zedaph’s base. It was set to fire out anything they put in the dispenser, and Zedaph was standing in what they were pretty sure was the landing zone. The launcher wasn’t really  _ necessary, _ but it was way more fun than just setting things down for Zedaph to try. They had tested it with a few items, including an anvil that Zedaph reckoned would be enough of a “meal” for the rest of the afternoon, and Impulse had a surprise idea coming next.

By reflex, Zedaph flinched as a lit TNT was lobbed at his face.

It connected with his forehead, and he felt himself consume it anyway - apparently, hitting any voidly part of him was enough. Like the lava a few days prior, the explosives gave him a brief boost of extra energy. He grinned - a smile that was getting hard to see - and gave his friends a thumbs-up.

For fun, they launched another, but the shot went wide. Zedaph dodged out of the way as the explosion sent up a fountain of sand. “Hey!”

At the same moment, their communicators made a death-message buzz, and when they’d finished giggling at Zedaph, all three checked out of habit.

**MumboJumbo blew up**

<Grian> ???

<MumboJumbo> what

<Grian> how did that even happen

<Grian> how did you die when all you were doing was standing next to me

<MumboJumbo> well it was YOU I was standing near

<Grian> fair point but also I did nothing I swear

“Only Mumbo,” Tango laughed.

“That’s kind of a funny coincidence,” Impulse observed, “Mumbo getting blown up at the same time that  _ we’re _ setting off TNT.”

“Yeah,” Tango agreed, hopping down from the cannon. “And he’s halfway across the Sea, I don’t even know what he was doing. What are the odds?”


End file.
